App Marketing Services: How to Compare Providers

Agencies with a verified published price

How to compare app marketing agencies

1. Agree the success metric before anything else. Decide what the campaign is bought for: trials, subscriptions, retained users at day thirty, or revenue per install cohort. Write it into the contract with the measurement window stated. An agency judged on installs will deliver cheap installs, and cheap installs from the wrong audience are the most common way an app budget disappears.
2. Check store listing work is actually included. App store optimisation is the compounding half of the job: the title and subtitle, the keyword field, the screenshots, the preview video, the localisation, and the ratings prompt timing. Ask what changes they will make in the first month and how they will test them, because paid acquisition into a weak listing pays for traffic that converts elsewhere.
3. Ask how they measure under platform privacy limits. Attribution on mobile depends on user consent and on platform frameworks that aggregate and delay the signal. Ask which measurement partner they use, how they handle the aggregated postbacks, and how they run incrementality tests. An agency that describes attribution as a solved problem is either unaware or hoping you are.
4. Separate the fee from the media and check who holds the accounts. Get the management fee quoted separately from the media budget, and insist the ad accounts and the measurement platform sit in your company's name. A percentage-of-spend fee rewards spending more; a flat fee does not. Whichever you choose, know what the incentive is before you agree to it.

What actually moves the fee

Three inputs explain most quotes. The first is the number of channels being run, since paid social, search, the app store ad products and any programmatic or offerwall inventory each carry setup, creative requirements and daily management. The second is creative volume, which on mobile is the largest ongoing cost because ad fatigue is fast and a serious programme ships new variants continuously rather than monthly. The third is the measurement setup, which is a real engineering project when it involves a measurement partner, server-side events and cohort reporting rather than a pixel dropped on a page.

Category matters too. A subscription app with a long payback window can afford a very different acquisition cost from a transactional one, and an agency that does not ask about your payback period in the first meeting is not planning around your economics. Expect media to be billed separately and to dwarf the fee. The useful comparison between proposals is fee per channel per month, plus the number of creative variants committed, not the headline percentage.

The evidence to demand before signing

Ask for two case studies in your category and business model, with the metric that improved named precisely, the time period stated, and the measurement method described. Vague improvement claims with no window and no method are not evidence. Ask to see a live report from an existing client, redacted, and check whether it reports retained users and revenue by cohort or only installs and cost per install.

Then ask about the parts nobody volunteers: how they detect and handle install fraud, what share of spend goes to networks they cannot see into, and what happened on their worst-performing account last year and why. An agency that can describe a failure honestly has a process. One that has never had a campaign underperform is either new or editing.

Terms worth settling in the contract

Ownership first: the ad accounts, the measurement partner account, the store console access and the creative files should all belong to you, with the agency granted access rather than holding the keys. This is routine to arrange at the start and expensive to unwind later, particularly when a measurement account holds your entire attribution history.

Then the working terms. Name the people on the account and their time commitment, agree the reporting cadence and the format, and set a review point far enough out that the measurement window has closed but near enough that a failing programme can be stopped. Also agree what happens to creative produced under the engagement, since that library is worth keeping whichever agency runs it next.

Questions people actually ask

Is app store optimisation or paid acquisition the better place to start?

Store listing work usually comes first because it improves the conversion rate of every visitor you later pay for. Paid acquisition into a weak listing spends money teaching you what a better listing would have earned for free.

Why is cost per install a poor way to judge an agency?

Because installs are the cheapest thing to buy and the least connected to revenue. Judge on retained users and revenue per acquired cohort over a stated window. Any agency comfortable being measured that way is the kind you want.

How long before an app marketing programme shows real results?

Paid channels produce install data within days, but the meaningful signal is cohort behaviour and that needs at least one full retention and payback window, commonly one to three months depending on your model. Judging earlier than that is judging noise.

Should the fee be a percentage of media spend?

It is common and the incentive is worth naming: the agency earns more when you spend more, regardless of returns. A flat fee or a resourced fee separates their income from your budget. Either can work if the incentive is understood and the review points are honest.

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